"Imagine a girl of seventeen or eighteen years of age, with sharp, knowing-looking features, a forward impudent carnage, and a pert flippant voice, standing upon one of the trunks, and surveying all our proceedings in the most impertinent manner. The creature was dressed in a ragged, dirty, purple stuff gown, cut very low in the neck, with an old red cotton handkerchief tied over her head; her uncombed, tangled locks falling over her thin, inquisitive face in a state of perfect nature. Her legs and feet were bare, and in her coarse, dirty, red hands she swung to and fro an empty glass decanter." The mission of this squalid nymph was not to borrow but to lend. She "guessed the strangers were fixin' there," and that they'd want a glass decanter to hold their whisky, so she had brought one over. "But mind--don't break it," said she; "'tis the only one we have to hum, and father says it's so mean to drink out of green glass"--a sentiment worthy of a colonel of hussars. Although quite pleased by such disinterested kindness and attention, Mrs. Moodie declined the decanter, on the double ground of having some of her own, and of not drinking whisky. The refusal was unavailing. The lady in ragged purple set down the bottle on a trunk, as firmly as if she meant to plant it there, and took herself off. The next morning cleared up the mystery of her perseverance. "Have you done with that 'ere decanter I brought across yesterday?" said the 'cute damsel, presenting herself before Mrs. Moodie with her bare red knees peeping through her ragged petticoats, and with face and hands innocent of soap. The English lady returned the bottle, with the remark that she had never needed it. "'I guess you won't return it empty,' quoth the obliging neighbor; 'that would be mean, father says. He wants it filled with whisky.'" The hearty laugh which this solution of the riddle provoked from the inmates of the log-house offended the female Yankee, who tossed the decanter from hand to hand and glared savagely about her. But the ridicule was insufficient to deter her from the whisky hunt. When assured there was none in the place, she demanded rum, and pointed to a keg, in which she said she smelt it. Her keen olfactories had not deceived her. The rum, she was told, was for the workmen: "'I calculate,' was the reply, 'when you've been here a few months, you'll be too knowing to give rum to helps. But old-country folks are all fools, and that's the reason they get so easily sucked in, and be so soon wound up. Cum, fill the bottle, and don't be stingy. In this country we all live by borrowing. If you want any thing, why, just send and borrow from us.'"